The
story of a father, told by his son
He was born in Dijon into
a working class family. The
third of six children, his father and mother were factory
workers. Even though it was a large family and times were
hard (my father used to tell me how he had to get up early
in the morning and go out to the fields to pick potatoes
or onions before joining his friends at school), there
was always bread on the table.
From a very early age,
Bernard wanted to become
a cook. His life was laid out for him and he had no worries
about his future. This was all due to his maternal grandmother
ANTOINETTE..
She arrived in France at the end of the First World War,
to escape from poverty in Italy. During that long journey,
she was often hungry. One day, she met a plump, well-fed
cook and concluded that this was obviously the best job
to choose if you wanted to have a permanently full stomach.
She immediately decided that one of her descendants would
be a cook.
The beginning of a long story,
or how a passion was born
As he was the most food-loving member
of the family, it was always Bernard who had the privilege
of tasting the sauce of the famous "coq au vin". Antoinette
knew exactly how to prepare Bernard for his career as
a great chef, by teaching him to recognise and understand
the true values given to us by Mother Nature. My father
did not disappoint his grandmother as he took the path
she had always wanted him to take.
"Practice makes perfect"
as the saying goes and Bernard's apprenticeships were
to provide him with the foundations for his career.
He began as an apprentice at the " Vieille Auberge " in
Auvillars-sur-Saone, near Nuits Saint Georges. At the
age of just fourteen, he left his own family to join that
of the cooking community. Then he left his home region
of Burgundy to take on Paris. He worked for Garin, who
at that time, was one of the great Parisian chefs. In
1970, he had to trade in his chef's hat for a soldier's
beret, but that did not prevent him from meeting GHISLAINE,
a young girl from the South (a French family from Oran
in Algeria), and falling in love with her. He came to
Marseille where she lived with her parents, with the idea
of taking her back to Burgundy with him. However, she
convinced him to stay in the South where the climate is
somewhat sunnier than in the land of snails.
Stephane
Loury
